Theological Discussion Thread

[clowns789]

It seems apparent this thread is necessary due to the posts in Why Not. I will start the talk off with a quote.

Originally Posted by T.Rex

Believing in God may mean you believe that there is beauty in everything, including Human beings.

I do not see any beauty in what Mr Silverman said.

So, is it a (logical) proof there is no God ? Not sure ...
We'll never know !

Tony

Actually, it is a lack of. Have you heard Einstein's religious opinions? He said there is no cold, but a lack of heat. Likewise, there is no evil, but an absence of God.

Try reading this.

[ewmayer]

Also, for those of you who may be wondering what happened to the theological discussion that broke out recently in this thread, at the request of several users I attempted to split the thread yesterday afternoon. The forum software doesn't seem to provide an automated way to do this (someone please correct me if I'm wrong), so I simply made 2 copies f the thread (and verified that they had separate thread IDs, i.e. were not just links to a single thread), placed one in the lounge and the other in the soapbox. I then deleted the theology posts from the lounge thread (leaving the original math-related posts), and went to the soapbox copy to make sure it was still intact. When I next went to delete the math-related posts (roughly the first half of the unedited original thread) from copy B, the whole thread magically vanished. Since I'd hard-deleted the theology posts from copy A, they were no longer recoverable. I contacted our forum meister Mike (Xyzzy), and he is similarly baffled as to what may have occurred.

Since the thread-copy operation appears to have produced 2 non-aliased copies of the thread as intended and I used precisely the same sequence of edit steps (just on a different subset of posts in each of the 2 copies), the only possibility that comes immediately to mind is that perhaps if one deletes a bunch of posts, including the first post of a thread (as i did with copy B), that triggers some kind of bug in the forum software that causes the thread to be deleted. I may create a small snadbox thread later today to play with this and see If I can reproduce the behavior without affecting any other users' posts.

Sorry about any inconvenience and about the lost data - my post on the theological stuff got zapped, too, so I feel your pain.

[T.Rex]

Originally Posted by clowns789

Actually, it is a lack of. Have you heard Einstein's religious opinions? He said there is no cold, but a lack of heat. Likewise, there is no evil, but an absence of God.

Try reading this.

Interesting. A reason why I do not appreciate religions is that they have not been able to change themselves by incorporating the new scientific knowledge that humanity has built and proven during the last centuries. Someone could believe in a God "who has not the powers of interfering with these natural laws". This is related to education. In a world where so few people have access to real education (Maths, Physic, Logic, Philosophy), it is obvious that many people do not have the intellectual tools for analyzing what religions are saying and when they are lying. (USA is a special case : though they are so rich and should be well educated, millions of americans still think that our world has been created 6000 years before now.) Religions do not want to change and to remove the mistakes from their theory. Or simply: they do not want to clearly say: "This is a parabole, an easy way to explain a complex idea. Do not think what is written is true. You have to understand the idea behind." Also, these old wonderful books are often badly translated. As an example, musulmans expect to encounter 40 virgins after their death. I've read that a correct translation of old arabic language shows that they will only receive white flowers.
Old religions have appeared at a time people were not able to understand our world. Now we understand much more. But I do not see new religions based on this new knowledge. Why ? Probably because it is so complicated to understand Maths or Physic theories and mainly to understand their proofs.
Since the laws of Physics we know are only an approximation of the reality (as an example, we cannot know where exactly our earth will be around the Sun in 1 million years simply because we do not know the exact weight of the earth.) there is a place for a religion to imagine what we don't know and that we will probably never know, like: "What was before the Big Bang ?".
(In my opinion, the answer to this question appears in the last seconds of "Men In Black I" movie: our world is simply an "atom" of another world !)

Last thing: A.E. said: "The proper guidance during the life of a man should be the weight that he puts upon ethics and the amount of consideration that he has for others. Education has a great role to play in this respect." In fact he did not take a big role in the education of his sons. Probably because: "it made it easier for me to isolate myself from the rest of the class and find that comfort in solitude that I so cherished."
T.

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

Also, for those of you who may be wondering what happened to the theological discussion that broke out recently in this thread, at the request of several users I attempted to split the thread yesterday afternoon. The forum software doesn't seem to provide an automated way to do this (someone please correct me if I'm wrong), so I simply made 2 copies f the thread (and verified that they had separate thread IDs, i.e. were not just links to a single thread), placed one in the lounge and the other in the soapbox.

It's (* sigh *) easy to see now that the "backup principle" was violated as soon as it became non-certain that the soapbox thread was an independent complete copy of the original thread. Perhaps that became non-certain as soon as the soapbox thread was created, if the forum software retained (unbeknownst to you) some linkage between the threads, or perhaps it became non-certain only as soon as the soapbox thread was first modified.

perhaps if one deletes a bunch of posts, including the first post of a thread (as i did with copy B),

Did you delete that first post of the copy B thread before, or after, you made your last deletion in the A thread?

(BTW, I claim that I am on-topic here because (a) I'm discussing certainty, (b) nothing is certain but death and taxes, and (c) discussions of death often bring in theology at some point. :)